Whew! The blog move is almost done, please continue to excuse the pregnant dust clouds. What an adventure today it has been moving 1,567 posts and 858 comments in 18 different categories made since July 4, 2003. Hasn’t gone completely smooth, of course, and unfortunately there seemed to be no importer from the prior blog program we were using to Wordpress 1.5, so I needed to write my own. It weighed in at 262 lines of PHP code (with comments).

The good news for others in the same boat is that I’ll be sharing this importer once I’ve used this blog for a little while and made sure that the importer didn’t miss anything important.

I still need to do some tinkering around with the entry page and search result templates, and gone are the recent comments on this page as well as a few other things (some of which I might like to put back like the mini-hmm linkdump blog). If there’s something missing that you particularly liked, please drop me a comment and let me know.

There is now a standard WP comments RSS feed as well so you can add that if you really want to keep up with the most recent comments, though. I have the old RSS feeds redirecting to the new ones (Atom and RSS 2.0). I didn’t change the WP defaults so that should keep it simple for those familiar with how that works, though I am going to go to crufty-URLs when I get some more time:

RSS 2.0

Oh, and the site doesn’t validate XHTML (it never did) and the calendar is really sad looking, I know … yowsa! This was a huge amount of work, that I hope not to have to go through for at least another couple years. I believe I was successful in keeping every reader comment, though the trackbacks weren’t imported (sorry). For those who did send trackbacks, the old pages and archives are still up and in tact and remain so for awhile until we figure out what we want to do with them. Since all the data is searchable through Wordpress it’s a little redundant, but there’s a ton of search engine listings pointing to those old pages so I need to make something that properly deals with that scenario. I have some ideas about doing a dynamic search so that it maps to the correct page in the new database and thus the search will remain in tact and then I can delete those old pages.

Oh, and I’ve modded WP so that the rel=’nofollow’ is not enabled. As some readers will remember, I’m not a fan of nofollow.

Time to go check out Friends Season 9 and get away from the keyboard for a little while.

• Disabling Nofollow in Wordpress 1.5
• Comments and Trackback Policy
• [free code] How to import from Pivot 1.2x to Wordpress 1.5x
• [site news] Problems with Wordpress and slow queries
• [site news] Slow page loading issues
• TypePad offers tip jar feature, still forcing rel=nofollow on all comments?